


No Further

by gingerblivet



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Had to be done, One Shot, because of course its a one shot with this story, consider this my venting about the entire thing, if I were still sixteen this would absolutely be a songfic, yes its a downer but look what we have to work with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 09:38:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9174058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerblivet/pseuds/gingerblivet
Summary: "When she was little, Jyn Erso had believed in right versus wrong. Her mother and father had told her stories of brave heroes fighting against evil, preserving life and love, and she had believed them. In the way many children do, she had thought that actions could be sorted into one of two categories: good, and bad."Or: The journey from child to adult is not a straight line.





	

When she was little, Jyn Erso had believed in right versus wrong. Her mother and father had told her stories of brave heroes fighting against evil, preserving life and love, and she had believed them. In the way many children do, she had thought that actions could be sorted into one of two categories: good, and bad. 

A grey day of reeds and running had shattered that belief; the moment she saw her mother raise a blaster with the intent to kill, her worldview began to evaporate like steam from a kettle. And it continued each day she lived with Saw, as she witnessed the actions of his Partisans trespass countless times over that ever-blurring line she thought she’d known. 

The day she awoke to find herself well and truly abandoned, it was like a revelation. There was no good and evil in the world, she told herself. There is only survival, and whatever you are willing to do to secure it. 

In truth, she was very talented at securing her own survival. Lies were an artform Saw had helped her perfect, a knife she could hone to slice through her obstacles. And if there was anything Jyn had enjoyed more in those years after sixteen, it was slicing. She channelled all of her rage- rage at the man in white who stole her parents, rage at being treated like a rabid mynock, rage at every step that had gotten her to this point- into a weapon that would keep her alive. A weapon she relished using, perhaps a bit too much.

But the problem with how Jyn survived was that it was draining. Before she had been sent to Wobani, there had been days when she wanted nothing more than to lay herself down on some soft corner of some world and sleep forevermore. Sometimes she had daydreams of doing just that, of finding a cave on a deserted island and becoming a hermit whose only companions were the fish and the rocks and the grass. It was a pleasant dream when she had it, even if she knew such a life would bore her to tears within a week. 

The mistake that had resulted in Jyn’s relocation to the infamous Imperial work colony may well have been born of a subconscious desire to find new motivation for her life, she admitted to herself. She had been distracted by thoughts of a solitary, crimeless life, and not been as thorough in cleaning up her trail as she should have been. And when the guano hit the fan, she wasn’t particularly surprised to find out she kind of helped to throw it. 

But just because she wanted out of Wobani didn’t mean she was willing to make any deals with the Alliance. Her experience with Saw had been as scarring as, or perhaps more than, the events leading up to them. And petty though it may be for her to blame the entire Rebel Alliance for her own misfortunes, she was unable to erase that pain from her memory and move past it. So she took a certain amount of pleasure in scowling at everyone she saw scurrying through the vine-covered halls at Yavin IV, so convinced of their righteousness in what was clearly an inevitable loss. She felt a thrill of amusement in particular in winking at the fellows who had released her restraints and gotten a shovel to the face for their efforts. There was nothing they could do to her that topped what the Empire had promised to dish out, as far as she was concerned. 

How quickly she was proven wrong. 

The mask she’d spent years crafting, that had served so well to hide her inner self from the galaxy, was shaken by an important woman in white. And then it was shattered when the man in the well-worn vest with a captain’s rank handed her the one thing she could not handle: Hope. 

That her father was alive was neither surprising nor expected. Her memories of his role in the Empire, before the farm, confirmed for her the fact that he was less than immediately dispensable. That he could possibly have been working against the “Imperial war machine”, as the captain so delicately put it, was what did her in. 

Jyn’s memories of her father were tucked away in a corner of her mind that had been sealed off, for her own sake. To think of him as dead helped the dissociation, helped her to wall off that person she had been then. It helped her to not hate who her imagination could have made him out to be. To Jyn, he had never changed, never grown old. And when she thought of him, she could pretend that she never had either. 

So it follows that when the wall in her mind was breached, Jyn reverted, however briefly, to herself as a child; naive, open, and honest. Everything she had since been learning to suppress. And masks made at 16 and tempered in subsequent years are not so flexible as to allow such a change, so it disintegrated into nothingness, and she felt very vulnerable indeed. 

Mentioning Saw made it worse.

She tried to rationalize the deal that then happened, that it was for her own good and nothing more, but the damage had been done. Each passing second that she and Captain Andor (and his belligerent droid) spent heading for Jedha, she could feel her childish self being reabsorbed into the woman she had become. She didn’t particularly like it, though, so denial was the line she toed. 

Before dozing off in the shuttle, Jyn studied her mission partner(s). Captain Cassian Andor, she had been told, worked in the Intelligence division, so he was clearly a talented liar like herself. Both he and the reprogrammed murder kettle found her untrustworthy for obvious reasons, but at least Andor possessed enough compassion to allow her to retain her blaster. She suspected he had other measures in place to ensure she wouldn’t use it on him, likely relying on the droid. And after meeting said droid, Jyn definitely wanted to avoid confronting it. She’d much rather deal with a taciturn human trained in combat than an idiosyncratic robot who could crush her trachea with barely a thought. 

After the years she’d spent alone, Jyn had to admit that she had no idea how to find her former guardian once given the chance. He could have cycled through dozens of cronies by now, rendering his retinue completely unknown to her. Or, she could place her faith in the idea that someone in his Partisans would recognize the girl they tossed aside and approach her. Jyn didn’t think the second scenario as likely as the first. 

And indeed, when the ambush happened, Jyn couldn’t pick out a face she could place in her memory. Which also meant that she didn’t feel bad when the Captain shot one down, rather than allow her to be reduced to smithereens. She didn’t feel like she really owed him, given the situation, but it demonstrated competence in the field. 

The blind monk who could apparently smell kyber crystals, on the other hand, she did owe, as well as his heavily armed companion. Though it was a long shot that Saw would have recruited two men of their background, their readiness to respond to threats of stormtroopers made her wonder. Granted, she turned out to be wrong, but still. 

That feeling from annoying the Alliance soldiers on Yavin resurfaced as she identified herself to one of Saw’s lieutenants; the feeling of satisfaction at being a wrench in others’ plans was fairly new to her life, but well cherished lately. 

Of the rest of their time on Jedha, Jyn could remember only snippets: Letting out a little of her rage at Saw, her father’s holo message, and Cassian’s face through a haze of tears were all perfectly clear, but the details surrounding them and the mad dash to escape the rising horizon were lost in a fog, it seemed. And perhaps it was for the best that she couldn’t remember losing one of the only parents she had known, even if they had been on less than perfect terms. That way she could spend less time mourning and more time moving toward a new purpose: destroying the Death Star. 

But Jyn was still backsliding in her psyche, she found. A week ago, she never would have let someone like Cassian leave on a mission without her. A week ago, she would have been clear-headed enough to track them, even in a downpour. A week ago, her mask would have kept her safe from her feelings long enough to realize that of course Cassian’s mission was to eliminate a valuable Imperial Science Officer, instead of rashly placing herself in the best position to watch her father be murdered by her newest colleagues. 

She wasn’t sure when she had regained the ability to moralize, but moralize she did to the Captain’s face. Even knowing that if there were someone tallying up all of the things each of them had done and sorting them into two piles as she used to, that they would be neck in neck, Jyn still found herself claiming the higher ground. And when Captain Andor called her on it, she forced herself to continue pretending she had it. 

The momentum of this change continued to grow as they returned to Yavin IV, and by the time Jyn was faced with the Council, she hardly recognized herself. Who was this woman, so filled with hope, and when had she appeared? When had the knowledge of how to draw lines in the sand been replaced in her brain, when she thought she had known the practice to be a lie? And when had she possessed even the slightest belief in “the greater good”, for all her experiences in the past had taught her it didn’t exist? This was a Jyn Erso of a very different ilk from what anyone in the galaxy had ever seen, save perhaps her father. And this Jyn had every bit of determination that her previous incarnations carried, reformed from a knife into a shield. 

That Cassian drew inspiration from this new Jyn strengthened her resolve. He provided her with something she had always known but never had: an army, and something she’d long forgotten: belonging. Looking into his face as he circled her, proud of his own conviction, she rediscovered how to trust. 

Their task was both clear and insurmountable, she thought. A shield was only good for protecting from one direction, and their path would be surrounded by every obstacle pointed every which way. Still, Jyn trusted the small, tenacious band they’d brought, and believed that all she could do was her own portion of work, and leave them to theirs. 

The journey to the data tower was completed with relative ease; Jyn felt some pride in the idea that the plan allowed them to dance past what she knew must have been dozens of levels of security, and straight into the heart of the Empire’s most precious information. And that was perhaps the highpoint of the day, from which everything else rolled downhill. 

Several pangs:   
-A data tape bearing her name, her father’s secret and last wish.  
-Kaytoo, shot to pieces and martyring himself to bar the path backwards.  
-Cassian, falling and slamming into support struts before hitting a landing and becoming very still.  
-The agonizing choice between the short climb down to save one and the long climb upwards to save billions

But though these made the next moments more difficult, Jyn found herself stronger for them. It was a possibility she had never known to exist, that pain itself could immediately temper a soul if it hit the right place, rather than breaking it to need reforming. She supposed it could be one of those life lessons that only comes with age, and not merely with experience, and she had only just now gained the years to perceive it. Or it could be something entirely new, however unlikely that might be. 

Seeing Krennic, face to face, almost untouched by time since their last meeting, was freeing. She had been helpless to watch him divest her of her life as a child, but she was now in the position to return the favor, and it was the strongest she’d ever felt. Her smile was genuine, though it delivered a lie, and it was unable to be restrained from bursting forth. Unlike, she discovered moments later, her latent rage at the white-caped man, which was so easily corralled by Cassian, and reduced to a memory of a fire. 

The plans were sent. Their mission, complete. The future, at least from the time the lift doors opened at the top of the tower until they opened at the bottom, free and open. 

And during that controlled, encased, vertical drop, Jyn looked into the eyes of a man she trusted, and she allowed herself to imagine that future. It was the first time she had employed that part of herself since she was small, but it felt entirely new. What passed between her and Cassian in those moments was every emotion the both of them had tried to lock away in their youth, come back to tie them together in an unbreakable bond.

Unbreakable even in the heat of the blast wave headed their way, as Jyn and Cassian knelt on the sand, hands clasped. 

And as the kyber crystal at Jyn’s neck pressed into Cassian’s chest, she faced the light with her arms around him, and found the strength to draw one last line in the sands of Scarif:

No further without him.

**Author's Note:**

> I am forever grateful to the fandom for resolutely ignoring canon, for the most part, but sometimes you just need to cope, right? And since I've not been able to get this movie out of my head since its premiere, I feel like the way to get some closure is to make myself thoroughly sad. I hope you enjoy. Or if not, I hope whoever reads this can forgive me for giving them the feels.


End file.
